Bill Hatcher Photography

Sydneys First Mountain Bike Park

Sydney has a new mountain bike park, it's first. I went there yesterday with riders Nic Learmonth, Kath Bicknell and Melanie Bell to check it out.

It's located on Sydney's North Shore at the Golden Jubilee Sports Field in North Wahroonga and borders Kuringai National Park. You couldn't find a more spectacular setting for a bike park. The new park has three trails with a XC trail on the steep west facing hillside and on the hilltop there is the pump track and bike skills trail.

My vote of the coolest trail goes to the XC- flow track and it makes for some nice photos as well.

The park was built in a short few months by World Trail an outfit based in Queensland. These pro's from the far north know about trail building in wet country and how to build a sustainable trail in a place like Sydney where it rains hard, I have no doubts this trail is built to last. The park's official opening isn't until next month, but the trails were open and already busy with riders this weekend. The bike park links

Cockatoo Island

Are adventure photographers inherently selfish people? Maybe we are. For the last few weeks I have been enjoying climbing, hiking, paddling and biking all over New South Wales, Australia, but you don't see any photographic proof of that here. Did I make any photos while I was out, a few, but most of the time my hands were full of sweaty bike bars or trying to

Photography and Place

Yesterday I wandered the halls of the Art Gallery in New South Wales in Sydney to view the current free photography exhibit "Photography and Place: Australian landscape photography 1970's until now". The exhibit shows the work of 18 photographers including works by Australian photo luminaries I have long admire including Bill Henson and Ricky Maynard. The photography is by art photographers, but their approach to photographing the Australian landscape is not what I expected to see. What I expected to see were lots of arty-type concept works. What I did see were often simple representative images of the landscape. The photographers approach in these works was to record the landscape as would a historian or documentary photographer. I better stop there or I'll start sounding like a critic and not like a photographer.

The prints are often very big, like the 100x148cm images of wind swept ice in the Antarctic (is that in Australia?) by David Stephenson. You'll find mix of Black and White and the color prints. None of the photography in color was the easy to digest over saturated bright color landscape photography that is popular today. What I enjoyed most in this exhibit were Lynn Silverman's Horizons series she did in 1979 and Paul Ogier's new work from the Emu Field Atomic Test Site. In the exhibit are a couple of Rosemary Laing prints from her Heysen series from 2005, I don't like those as much as her earlier work.However, A couple of floors below are some Laing prints that might be for a new installation-the room was blocked from entry. The  Laing prints I could see include #2, of the burning car in the desert, are from her 2003 series titled "One dozen Unnatural Disasters in the Australian Landscape".

It was also nice to see some prints from the NSW Art Gallery collection that I have only see in books. Like the Perisher Valley prints by Ingeborg Tyssen.

If you have time you really should check out Photography and Place at the NSW Art Gallery. 

Weather Channel: Peter Lik

As we all know landscape and wildlife photography is normally a quiet and solitary past time and you wouldn't think a landscape photographer and his work would have have the glitz and dynamics to attact a big TV audience. But this month the U.S. TV network the Weather Channel announced they plan to unveil their first ever regular TV series called "From the Edge" and it stars Australian landscape photographer Peter Lik. Peter now lives in Las Vegas. On the video link below he is in Red Rocks, Nevada on the outskirts of Vegas to  introduce his show.

If the name of Lik's show sounds familiar wildlife photographer Art Wolfe did a similarly named photography show "Travels to the Edge" that aired for two seasons on PBS. Art Wolfe, however, is not an entertainer and the big draw of his show is it's great footage of incredible wild places around the world with just a dose of how-to photo tips.

The folks at the Weather Channel must have figured that if you mix a larger than life character such as the classic Australian persona (think Crocodile Dundee), with photography and casual conversation about the weather you might just have the ingredients for an entertaining show. I figure Lik is the perfect person for this show; with his Australian accent and the touch of the wild man photographer he will no doubt charm the American audiences.

I expect on my next visit to photograph in Wyoming to see all the serious photographers lineup at the Yellowstone River overlook sporting the new photography fashion of straw hats, ripped shirts and jeans. 

Devonport Art Award

The winner of the Devonport Award in Australia was just announced and you can read more (here). The winner is photographer and friend Matt Newton from Hobart, Tasmania. 

There is about a 99% chance you have not heard of this art award, there are so many art awards out there, but in this award the winner recives a $15,000 check and the Devonport Gallery places the art work in their permanent collection. The cool thing about Matt is he is a photo journalist and not an art photographer. His winning photo Moonbird Boy is part of a documentry photo series. Matt talks about the photo in his blog (here) and says, "It seems pretty amazing to see a documentary photo win an Art prize - who says photography is dead !" Matt was also a finalist in this years Moran photographic Award. 

Australian Photographers Protest

 

Over a thousand  photographers are planning to attend a protest rally organised by Arts Freedom Australia (AFA) on Sunday 29 August to make a stand  for photographers rights.

If you are in Sydney area or even if you're just here for a visit come on down to the waterfront for some good clean fun. This is a chance to meet fellow professional photographers and show your support for an important cause. Showing up demonstrates your concern about excessive photography permits and restrictions when photographing on public lands and in public spaces, for example the Sydney Harbour where this rally will take place.

 More info can be found on the AFA blog site (here) Don't forget to bring your camera! See you there on Sunday.

Dean Sewell wins 2010 Moran Contemporary Photographic prize

 

Winners of the Doug Moran National Portrait prize and the Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize were awarded last night in Sydney. The former is the prizes painting category.  The Moran prize awards $80,000 to the wining photographer and $150,000 to the wining painter. This makes the Moran prize by far the wealthiest photography prize in Australia.

You can click on Dean Sewell's winning photo image above to view all 45 Moran finalist.

Yahoo news reports,  "For the second consecutive year, Sydney photographer Dean Sewell was awarded first prize in the Open section of the Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize for his work titled Cockatoo Is. Ferry. He wins $80,000 for the black-and-white work, out of 45 photographs that made the final judging.All the works are on display in the Moran Prizes exhibition at the State Library of NSW until September 5. Entry is free."

Dean Sewell is a photojournalist and member of the Australian photography collective Oculi.  

The photography judge for this years comp is the Australian photojournalist Stephen Dupont. You might remember his remarkable video account of his close call with a suicide bomb attack in Afghanistan (here). 

Cool bikes and the cool people that ride bikes

{I spent time organizing photo harddrives yesterday and I found this series of bike pics I took in Denmark last year.}  You never know when you might see a cool bike. Just another reason you should always have a camera with you. These are some pedal bikes in Copenhagen the indisputable bike friendliest city in the world.

                                                          

             

All photos taken with a nikon D-700 and 24-70 2.8 zoom. I have a smaller D-300s I use as well, the fact is I still like the slr for nailing a shot than the slower point and shoot or range finder cameras.
 
 
 
 

   

Tasmania: High country Mustering at the Vale of Belvoir

I have been on some cattle drives on ranches in the American west, but the first thing I learned when I photographed a cattle drive in the in Tasmania is you don't herd cattle you muster them, the cattle live on a station not a ranch and the owner of the station is called a farmer not a rancher. There's more, but that was my start.

I was photographing the muster in the Vale of Belvoir on private land owned by the Tasmanian Land Conservancy who had recently purchased the land from the Charleston family. The TLC has allowed the family to continue their farming traditions on the land. The morning I arrived Kevin Charleston had already moved most of the cattle off the summer range of the Vale a couple of weeks earlier. What remained were about 50 cows and calves of the original herd of 250. Tasmanian photographer Matt Newton took some photos of me out on the range during the shoot and you can see those on the TLC blog.

Because of the long tradition of mustering and farming on the high country Vale of Belvoir I decided to shoot the muster in Black and White. The photos will be printed in Sydney at BlancoNegro and exhibited December 2010 in a group gallery show as a fund raiser for the TLC. The location of the exhibit is the Wilderness Gallery at the entrance to Cradle Mountain National Park that borders the Vale of Belvoir. The show will also travel to Hobart. Details of these exhibits will be announce closer to the date. The photo below is of Kevin Charleston in the cattle pens during the muster at the Vale last week.

 
 
 
 

Tasmania and the Public Forest

Photography is such a great way to communicate a story. Take for example Aaron Huey's story about the Lakota Indians on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota?  If you haven't seen that story it's worth a look. 

Tasmania has had a long battle between forestry and environmentalist opposed to their forest practices. As with any story there are extremes on each side of the story.  A news story on the ABC news broadcast Stateline gives the details. 

The Upper Florentine forest is typical of the unique temperate rainforest of Tasmania and part of the public lands that Forestry Tasmania manages. For this reason it is also the location of Tasmania's longest continuously held anti-logging forest protest. The activist group Still Wild Still Threatened (SWST)  has been active here 24/7 for over three years. The SWST protest site is built literally over a logging road with a main tent and a maze of ropes that lead into the tree homes. At times the camp has been raided and the protesters have had to set up camp on the nearby highway. I was interested in getting up into their tree platforms. I climbed into a couple of the camps tree platforms located 50 meters up in the trees with Dylan a SWST activist. 

A few feet from the protest camp is a new logging operation that was pushed into the forest last year. This is the first of several coups that will be logged in the near future along a new 3.2 km. logging road.

 

 

After the forest is clear cut it is then burned intensively with jellied petroleum bombs dropped from helicopters. This practice creates an extremely hot fire and often kills trees left standing in the coupe as well as trees on the edge of the coupe. The photo below shows public forest in the Weld Valley  three months after a bombing run. With unclaimed massive cut logs laying on the ground.

 

This former section of forest was still smouldering three months after being put to the torch!

 
 The land has been conditioned in this fashion so that no animal or plant might compete with the new mono crop of plantation trees.  

 

These mono crop plantations now checker themselves in many of Tasmania's public native forest. It's possible that more sustainable forest practices such as Australian Group Selection could be considered.